TY - JOUR
T1 - Learning to navigate
T2 - Experience versus maps
AU - Meilinger, Tobias
AU - Frankenstein, Julia
AU - Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (Grants ME 3476/2 and SFB/TR8 ), by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant P12779 ), and by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s World Class University program (Grant R31-10008 ). We thank Sandra Holzer, Nadine Simone and Mary O’Malley for help in running participants and/or data analysis, Ekaterina Volkova for computing Levenshtein distances, Betty J. Mohler, Michael Weyel and Stefan Streuber for help with the virtual reality setup and Rita Carter for proofreading.
Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2013/10
Y1 - 2013/10
N2 - People use "route knowledge" to navigate to targets along familiar routes and "survey knowledge" to determine (by pointing, for example) a target's metric location. We show that both root in separate memories of the same environment: participants navigating through their home city relied on representations and reference frames different from those they used when doing a matched survey task. Tübingen residents recalled their way along a familiar route to a distant target while located in a photorealistic virtual 3D model of Tübingen, indicating their route decisions on a keyboard. Participants had previously done a survey task (pointing) using the same start points and targets. Errors and response latencies observed in route recall were completely unrelated to errors and latencies in pointing. This suggests participants employed different and independent representations for each task. Further, participants made fewer routing errors when asked to respond from a horizontal walking perspective rather than a constant aerial perspective. This suggests that instead of the single reference, north-up frame (similar to a conventional map) they used in the survey task, participants employed different, and most probably multiple, reference frames learned from "on the ground" navigating experience. The implication is that, within their everyday environment, people use map or navigation-based knowledge according to which best suits the task.
AB - People use "route knowledge" to navigate to targets along familiar routes and "survey knowledge" to determine (by pointing, for example) a target's metric location. We show that both root in separate memories of the same environment: participants navigating through their home city relied on representations and reference frames different from those they used when doing a matched survey task. Tübingen residents recalled their way along a familiar route to a distant target while located in a photorealistic virtual 3D model of Tübingen, indicating their route decisions on a keyboard. Participants had previously done a survey task (pointing) using the same start points and targets. Errors and response latencies observed in route recall were completely unrelated to errors and latencies in pointing. This suggests participants employed different and independent representations for each task. Further, participants made fewer routing errors when asked to respond from a horizontal walking perspective rather than a constant aerial perspective. This suggests that instead of the single reference, north-up frame (similar to a conventional map) they used in the survey task, participants employed different, and most probably multiple, reference frames learned from "on the ground" navigating experience. The implication is that, within their everyday environment, people use map or navigation-based knowledge according to which best suits the task.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84880025183&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84880025183&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.05.013
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.05.013
M3 - Article
C2 - 23820180
AN - SCOPUS:84880025183
VL - 129
SP - 24
EP - 30
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
IS - 1
ER -